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Fannie Mae Case Study

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The role of umbilical cord is to connect baby with the placenta. Through this connection, the umbilical vein provides nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood from the placenta on the fetus. After the birth, doctors cut the cord and the baby becomes independent from the mother(Wang & Zhao, 2010). In contrast with the birth procedures, when the Fannie Mae became independent (private), the cord was not cut creating a plethora of problems. Nevertheless, it is an oversimplification to accuse exclusively government and GSEs', as Petter J; Wallison (2010) does, disregarding all the other factors. A brief historical review would allow to understand these problems and to highlight why the GSEs became an important part of the crisis. Before 1938, depository institutions made home loans with their deposits and held the liquidity risk, the market risk, and the credit risk on their portfolios. Yet, the baneful results of the Great Depression led the US government agency to intervene in the mortgage market so as to beget home mortgage lending (Dodd, 2007). A corollary of the new legislation was the creation of Fannie Mae in 1938; as a …show more content…

This corporation was created not only to enhance the competition in the secondary mortgage market (Acharya, Richardson et al. 2011), but also to securitize mortgages, as Dodd (2007) mentions. The process of pooling mortgages and selling mortgage-backed securities (MBS) was developed, initially, by Ginnie Mae to reduce debt from the federal budget; the concept of securitization is discussed analytically later. The following years, MBS and securitization assisted GSEs to provide long-term funding in the US secondary mortgage market eliminating liquidity risk from originators while bearing both the credit and the interest rate risk (Dodd, 2007, Wall et al., 2005). The securitization could obliterate the interest rate risk from housing enterprises, as

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